Bruce Haynes’s latest book should
come with a reader advisory: WARNING! The End of Early Music
may induce euphoria and cause the reader to spontaneously express their
appreciation vocally. Choose your reading venue accordingly.

This tome may also cause major
paradigm shifts in how one hears and thinks about music and music making.
After this book, many classical music lovers might never use the term
“baroque violin” again. With luck, Hayne’s work will lead to increased
abandon and wildness in public performances of baroque music.

Haynes, who turned 65 this year,
is a soft-spoken man who wears reassuringly comfortable clothes. He
is not afraid to speak his mind, and writes on baroque music with an
authority to which few can lay claim. In the 1960’s, during the baroque
revival, Haynes was one of the revolutionaries who organically mastered
period instruments – in his case, the baroque oboe. Alongside an important
performing career, Haynes has trained two generations of baroque oboists
at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague and in Montreal, where he is
a professor at McGill University. He is also an authority on the history
of pitch.

The End of Early Music distills
Haynes’s lifetime of period music making (or Historically Inspired
Performance- HIP, as he prefers to call it) and scholarship into an
astute, provocative, and immensely readable text. He carefully takes
stock of what HIP has meant over the past four decades, and predicts
where it might fruitfully move next.

In many ways, Haynes’ book carries
on the great 21st-century burden of extricating so-called classical
music from the cultural baggage of the 19th century. Those archaic values
have become so ingrained in conservatory training that few classical
musicians are even conscious of them, let alone question them.

The brilliant U.S. musicologist
Richard Taruskin, whom Haynes cites frequently throughout, has been
a key figure in untangling romantic biases from our musical DNA. In
the 1980’s, Taruskin, who was a fine gambist himself before retirement,
pricked on many HIP balloons while he argued that it had little to do
with how baroque music was played in its day, and everything to do with
our modernist rebellion against romanticism. That is what led to “strait”
(as Haynes spells it) performances of early music – clean but bland
concerts that Haynes calls “click-track baroque.”

Taruskin and Haynes are both musical
heroes, and their work compliments each other’s well. Both men want
us to know ourselves as products of romanticism and our own times. Taruskin
launches the debate in one of his “Old Testament” moods, jolting
HIP out of its complacency with intellectual brimstone. Haynes takes
the more philosophical approach. He believes that HIP has always had
a wild and wooly stream running alongside the dreaded strait. Haynes
is comfortable with the fact that authenticity in music (he suggests
we reclaim the “A-word” from the dustbin) seems “more than anything
else… to be a statement of intent” rather than an attainable goal.
In other words, the path to HIP enlightenment is so much fun that one
should continue the journey, however long it takes (a sentiment ultimately
shared by Taruskin).

The heart of Haynes’ book –
and the part that could really change the way people (including HIP
practitioners) hear and perform music — is the central position he
gives to one of the most difficult aspects of 17th- and 18th-century
music: rhetoric.

“Rhetorical music,” Haynes
writes, “had as its main aim to evoke and provoke emotions – the
Affections, or Passions – that were shared by everyone, audience and
performers alike. Canonic [i.e., Romantic] music, by contrast, was usually
autobiographical in some sense, often describing an extreme experience
of the artist-composer: cathartic or enlightening, but above all solitary
and individual… Another difference was that while Rhetorical music
was temporary, like today’s films—appreciated, then forgotten—Canonic
music was eternal and enduring. Rhetorical music was transient, disposable;
its repertoire constantly changing. Canonic music was by definition
stable, repeatable, and orthodox.”

“What Windows is to computers,”
Haynes adds, “Rhetoric was to Baroque and Renaissance musicians: it
was their operating system, the source of their assumptions about what
music was and what it was supposed to accomplish.” This rhetorical
“operating system” consists of small musical gestures or figures
– the very things that romantic performance obliterates through long
lines and painfully earnest emphasis on every note. Those rhetorical
figures had emotional meanings that people of the time more or less
commonly understood.

To play baroque or 18th-century
music rhetorically is to play not less, but more expressively
than romantic (or of course modern) style—as witnessed by reports
of 18th-century performers and listeners. They were transported to a
degree that would make many audiences and performers—historically
informed or not—uncomfortable today.

Haynes dubs rhetorically focused
interpretation “eloquent style,” and in opposing it to strait style,
he offers a far richer perspective than the basic terms of reference
like “boring” versus “passionate.” Non-HIP musicians who read
this book—and it should become required reading for students—will
also find a route into baroque music that goes beyond the surface issues
like crisp eighth notes or curtailed vibrato.

Readers can log on to a companion
website to listen to wonderfully chosen excerpts from commercial recordings.
Haynes guides the reader through the examples of romantic style of baroque
performance from early 20th-century recordings, eloquent
HIP and strait HIP.

Haynes’s plainspoken, often witty
prose makes complex ideas easy to grasp. His citations include not only
a vast array of scholarly sources, but also words of wisdom on style
from Coco Chanel, and graffiti found on a bathroom wall in a present-day
music conservatory.

He elaborates his ideas with the
natural flow of an old hand improvising ornaments in baroque music,
and permits himself the delightful subjectivity of treatise writers
from the rhetorical era. Just as Francesco Geminiani, writing in 1751,
did not hesitate to trash “that wretched Rule of drawing the Bow down
at the first Note of every Bar,” Haynes takes “a well-known Period
orchestra in Toronto” to task for refusing to allow its musicians
to add ornaments to the written scores of canonic 18th-century pieces
like Messiah. However Haynes’ does this not to snipe, but to
expose 19th-century values underlying an HIP performance.

Meanwhile, scores of readers will
be relieved to learn that they are not the only ones who find the Tallis
Scholars “boring, without message.” They will also be delighted
that Haynes believes that Cecilia Bartoli’s intensely expressive,
text-centered performances of Vivaldi “give us an idea how powerful
[the old Baroque tradition of declamation] must once have been.”

In the epigraph, Haynes chose three
lines from Joni Mitchell’s 1966 song “The Circle Game” that describes
us as “captive on the carousel of time”: We can’t return, we
can only look behind from where we came.
Indeed, Haynes analogizes that today’s HIP practitioners are like
the Florentines who set out to re-create Greek drama at the end of the
16th century and ended up inventing something totally new—baroque
music. Likewise, our most meticulous re-creations of “early music”
will inevitably be of our own time.

For Haynes, The End of Early
Music merely means the demise of classical music’s Ptolemaic self-centeredness—the
delusion that today’s classical music practices represent the norm
from which everything else deviates. It also refers to his rechristening
of the term “early music” as “rhetorical music”—a far more
meaningful term that will surely take root.

By the book’s end, Haynes is
still looking forward to uncovering the unexplored realms of HIP—the
cultivation of advanced improvisation skills, and composition of music
in baroque style. Haynes titles his last chapter “A Perpetual Revolution.”
Clearly, the fun has only just begun. n